Winning by numbers: how performance analysis is transforming sport

Murray invited Williams to give a
series of talks on the theory of skill acquisition to his team of
performance analysts in October 2010. In late 2009 the British
Olympic archery team recruited a new coach, an American called
Lloyd Brown. When Brown later assessed his new team he noticed that
some of the athletes were using an inefficient technique when
drawing the bow. With three months left for competition, Brown was
keen to apply Williams's theory to accelerate the learning of a
better technique.

Sports scientists make an emphatic
distinction between two types of feedback. Intrinsic feedback comes
from the athlete itself and varies in degrees -- say, the awareness
of the archer that he or she has just missed the target -- to a
more attuned perception of movement, such as how much force he or
she has produced in the bow. Extrinsic feedback on the other hand,
originates from outside sources, from the coach shouting
instructions on the sidelines to the post-match video analysis. In
a sense, extrinsic feedback is what allows the athlete to compare
how he or she has really performed with how he or she thinks they
have performed.

"It's fundamental that athletes get
feedback to learn, but what's the best method for coaches to
provide feedback and promote accelerated learning?" Williams asks.
Sports coaches usually assume that the best way to run a practice
session is to provide lots of instructions and hands-on
demonstrations. This, however, is not the best way to accelerate
learning. "Athletes become dependent on that feedback," Williams
says. "When it comes to the competition, they aren't able to
replicate that skill. Athletes need to create
self--sufficient mechanisms of feedback."

A study by Nicola Hodges and Ian Franks, professors
at the University of British
Columbia School of Kinesiology, for instance, showed that
novice football players would learn faster by following general
verbal instructions, such as "Can you pass the ball into the
near-post area?" rather than being taught specifically how this
could be achieved. Coaches, then, need to be able to provide the
least amount of extrinsic feedback required to progress and let the
athletes engage in self-discovery, in trial and error. This fine
balance between extrinsic and intrinsic feedback helps athletes
calibrate their own perception of their performance, which
accelerates their learning. Novices need more feedback. As athletes
become more skilled and experienced, the feedback they require is
more detailed and less frequent.

After the workshops with Mark Williams, Brown and EIS
performance analyst Oliver Logan designed a programme to teach
their archers to relearn how to draw the bow. They first asked the
archers to try the new technique in the easiest possible way with
an elastic band, rather than a bow. They would have cameras
overhead and use live video feedback and practise while watching
themselves from above. Later, they delayed the feedback by ten
seconds, allowing the archers to cross-reference what they thought
they did with the visual feedback from the video.

Sometimes, unless the trial had been particularly
bad, they wouldn't get any feedback at all. After a couple of
months, the archers were already practising with targets, with
background noise to mimic real crowds and in direct competition
with other archers. Brown would call their name out and commentate
live. They would also give the archers small financial incentives
depending on their score, or force them to drink a pint of water so
that they would shoot while needing urgently to urinate.

"It's important to make training as
replicable to match play as possible," Stafford Murray says. In six
months, the archers had learned not only how to draw the bow
differently, they had improved their scores by an average of ten
points. Through accelerated learning they had reached unconscious
competence. Of that group, three archers are expected to represent
Great Britain in London 2012.

"In squash practice, sometimes we project a match
against the front wall and have the player play a virtual match, so
it's much like shadow boxing," Murray says. Players would be
playing against the world number one, ghosting the movements in the
match -- exactly the same kind of movements that they would be
doing were they playing in the real match. Physically, they would
cover the same distance. Their heart-rate would be almost the same.
"Performance analysis shows you exactly where the demands for
competition are," Murray says. "We overload the training based on
that data. There's no guesswork. You can't argue with the
data."

We commonly assume that athletic
skill is a random combination of innate talent and mere
accumulation of years of experience. Why? Because this analysis
simplifies our understanding of skill. It allows us to think of
skill of something more akin to a mystery than as an art or science
that can be dissected and understood.

But that mindset wouldn't have helped the British
archers or elite athletes like Nick Matthew. Instead, they
methodically diagnosed and addressed their shortcomings using data
and feedback. That's what accelerated learning is: a smarter
approach to learning a skill. It provides a scientific way to look
into skill, decompose it into its elementary components and address
them.

Insofar as there are general principles that underpin
expertise, it is potentially possible to take accelerated learning
out of the sports arena and apply it to our skills in order to
become better at whatever it is we do. With enough motivation, we
can adopt the principles of accelerated learning and do what the
great athletes do: shelve our perfect skills and employ a
scientific approach to correct our imperfections.

In Beijing in 2008, Great Britain
finished fourth, with 47 medals, their second-highest haul in
Olympic history. One of the 19 golds was won by Rebecca Romero, who
had recently switched sports from rowing to cycling. She had rowed
since the age of 17 and had won silver at the Athens Olympics in
2004 in the quadruple sculls, and gold in the World Championships
the following year. In January 2006, she retired after a back
injury, and decided to try cycling. The British cycling team tested
her on a bike in a lab to measure her power output. "They said I
had one of their best results ever," Romero says. "It was insane. I
didn't have the physiology or the bike skills. Very quickly I was
being taught everything and I was going from a nothing to being a
member of the team and aiming for an Olympic
medal."

Romero and Dan Hunt, her coach,
devised a training plan. They determined what would be world-class
times and what power output and speed she needed to break those
times. Every detail was part of the equation: size of the gear,
drag, humidity and temperature of the velodrome, body shape, body
position. Romero would take notes of all her training sessions,
recording what she done, her thoughts and where there was room from
improvement. "I call it data ammunition," she says. "When I was
preparing, we tailored all the training so that everything I was
doing would lead me to be at the right point in two-and-a-half
years. We couldn't afford unnecessary training."

In 2008, she qualified for Beijing
-- and won gold in the individual pursuit category final. Romero
had been training for less than two years. "People talk about the
ten years it takes to achieve something, but I believe you can
accelerate the learning process if you are smart about the way you
practise," says Romero. "It isn't just aboutthe hours and hours of training, it's all the tiny
things that add up."

Comments

Very good article that demonstrates that without technology not only you do not win but you cannot make it to the next level.

Victor Bergonzoli

Jun 26th 2012

Great article. It clearly shows the value of using video assisted coaching tools

Chuck Wilmot

Jun 26th 2012

So when will US money and technology produce a world class footballer? How is it that the Ivory Coast can produce a Drogba and Kalou winning the champions league but the US is unable to with all of their technology?